32 Scene
JOE LYCETT
Catherine Muxworthy sits down to chew the fat with stand-up comedian and consumer rights hero Joe Lycett ahead of his UK tour ) Comedian and consumer rights activist Joe
Lycett was born in Birmingham and began his career as a stand-up comic in 2007. Growing up as a queer child in the West Midlands, Joe recollects his coming out experience. “I was very upset when I told my parents,” Joe told Scene. “My mum was the first person I told in the family and then I spoke to my dad about it and he was really great. They were both really great but you know I was very nervous about telling them, and I wasn’t sure it was going to go well but they were wonderful.”
“The idea of going to a straight club fills me with sort of dread. I go to gay clubs all the time and have the best time, it’s a better place to be” Older family members, however, had been raised in a different time and needed to shed their ingrained prejudices in order to accept Joe’s queer identity. “My grandad sort of said in this weird passing statement, he said that if he knew any of his kids were gay he would have drowned them at birth,” Joe reveals. “It was such a sort of dramatic thing because he wasn’t a dramatic person and I remember being like ‘oh that’s weird’, and I hadn’t come out in any way at that point and then I got older and started doing stand-up and I never formally come out to him, but he completely changed his mind on that because he realised it was an old-fashioned view that he probably just picked up when he was a kid and it wasn’t actually what he thought. It was just what he thought he should say. And all that came from the fact
that he met me, and he saw me, and he loved me, and he knew that I wasn’t anything to be frightened of and there was nothing wrong with me and that he loved me as I was. So, representation is really important in real life, it’s important to meet people from different cultures, sexualities, genders, and backgrounds. “I came out in sixth form and I think I was the only person in my school, in my year group, who was openly anything but straight,” Joe says. “There wasn’t any out-and-out homophobia, well there was probably a little
bit, but generally it was just like ‘uh he’s weird’ rather than slurs or anything like that. “What I’ve realised in more recent years and have found out is that there are a lot of kids in my year, a lot of people that were in my year that came out afterwards, and some who ended up in long-term relationships with people that they maybe weren’t happy with but felt that they had to, you know, be straight. And that is a real problem and a real travesty for those people. It [my childhood] wasn’t that long ago, but I really feel like you see the kind
